LinkedIn’s CardMunch Eats Your Business Cards!

You meet different people. Some at a meeting, while others at a conference or even at the pub. You exchange business cards. What do you do next with their business cards? Right -you forget about them, but the reality of it is that you took them with the intention of using them.

Is it too naive to suggest a tool like CardMunch to deal with this situation? It will eat your business cards in no time!

CardMunch explained in 3 easy steps:

You simply take a picture of a business card and upload it

The guys at CardMunch will do the rest! They input the data from that business card into an electronic version – including the LinkedIn profile information and your common LinkedIn contacts.

You connect via LinkedIn or sync all the contact info with your addressbook or send them an email straight away.

Real peopleprocess your business card(s) so that, as long as it’s readable, it will get processed properly.OCR tools (optical character recognition) are not clever enough yet to provide the same service. We have been using different scanners in the past, and we must say that CardMunch does a superb job. Of course, we have tried it with business cards that scanners did not like…and it worked out just fine with CardMunch!

One of the disadvantages is that CardMunch only sends standard invitations to people you want to connect with on LinkedIn. That goes against all networking rules, but sadly is a reality today. The consequence is that we don’t use it to connect with those others on LinkedIn. That might sound a bit strange, because that was their initial goal. Hopefully they upgrade it in the next version!

Did we mention that CardMunch is for FREE?

So, what are you waiting for? Download the app and give it a try. It will save you time and all those trifling details you really don’t want to bother with!

To your success,

Bert Verdonck LinkedIn Expert | Speaker | Trainer | Mentor

PS: in case you did not know, LinkedIn bought CardMunch in 2011, so we expect that things will only get better

PPPS:Looking for more LinkedIn tips? Use one or more of the 20 tools to save time when using LinkedIn via the bestselling book “How to REALLY use LinkedIn”(a FREE download is available at www.reallyconnect.com).